Home ~ Part Five
Home.
"the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household."
When you read that word I'm sure you have feeling immediately spring up in your heart and in your minds. Home can mean so many different things. Home can be comfort. Home can be familiarity. Home can be security. But home can also bring about anxieties. Fears. Pain. Home is essential to every human being. What do you call home? Who do you call home? Where is home?
When I google songs about home 4,869,000,000 results come up. That’s a lot! There are songs to play that make you feel at home, a playlist to cycle through after you close your first home, songs that make remind you of home, songs for going home, and so many more!
We have physical homes, familial homes, church homes, work homes, places that are our second homes. Before I was 18, I had lived in one home all of my life. Never did I experience the joys and pains of packing up belongings, uprooting, unpacking, integrating, re-building and starting over. Nothing can ever prepare you for that. It's something you must simply journey through. Now that I'm mid thirties (and let the record be that now that I'm past the thirty mark I give age ranges!) I've officially logged five moves. Two of them were big moves- from Canada to the US and then US back to Canada. While this isn't a crazy amount of moves, all of them have been to new communities. New physical homes, new church homes and new work homes. The unchangeable factor in all these moves is that we have made them together. Our family has been our constant. Mind you we've added a child with each move, but the core of our family has been unchanged.
As a family we are embarking on yet another journey. This next phase is filled with a lot of unknowns and for me, a lot anxieties. These past five months have been some of the hardest days I've had to get through. But I'm learning and leaning into God's truths for me and for my family. He has so many good plans for us, plans we do not even know yet. And honestly, all of what has happened in the past five months and even past 15 years has been guided by God. We have derailed from His goodness for us and tried our own way but he keeps gently (and not so gently!) calling us back to him. C.S. Lewis pens it so beautifully in his intro to The Great Divorce,
We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.
Our house currently sits for sale. If everything goes well, we will have less than one month to vacate it. We are moving back to our community in Alliston. Not as Pastor Roelof and Kristin but just as Roelof and Kristin with their three amazing kids. And that is enough, at this time. We are going back to a community where we are loved. Where we can continue to build on relationships we cultivated when we lived there for six and half years. In a way, we feel like we are going back to our home.
We are in a season of being poured into, rather than pouring out. We are exhausted. We are hurt. We are hopeful. We are curious. We are loved. We are re-building. We do not live in shame. We will not live in the lies the enemy wants us to believe. God's love is greater for us than anything we can ever imagine. That has been continually revealed to us.
Home for us has to be each other, but more importantly, it has to be about abiding with God. I keep wanting to cling to what the world defines as home- a physical building, a church, a community, but I'm really, really learning where my true home is- with God. These things that I keep grasping onto, they are temporal. They may provide me with fleeting comfort, with safety and with familiarity, but they aren't the end destination. I fully believe all these journey's, these uprootings, these transitions are teaching me a greater narrative. That I will always long for home here on this earth. And I will continually feel I am missing something. My heart truly longs for something only God can fill. He is my home. He is our home.
These stories that I share here are reflections of my heart. If you want to start from the beginning of our story, I encourage you to read the whole way through. Starting with this post. Our story is one that has been given to us, we will continue to share aspects of it. In sharing our hearts, my heart, it is my prayer that you may know that you are not alone. No one should have to walk a journey in solitude. Journeys are meant to be walked in companionship. When we choose to alienate ourselves, or worse still, if we alienate someone, we are not living the way Jesus wants us to. He calls us to community. To love. Always.
Hear the Word, roaring as thunder
With a new, future to tell
For the dry, season is over
There is a cloud, beginning to swell
To the skies, heavy with blessing
Lift your eyes, offer your heart
Jesus Christ, opened the heavens
Now we receive, the Spirit of God
We receive Your rain
We receive Your rain
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